A client recently asked me if we could get sitelinks for our site in Google. I mentioned google sitelinks back in my series on Google Webmaster Tools (Part 4, specifically), but it was time for a closer look. Just how does Google decide to put sitelinks on certain sites in their search results? Well, as usual with Google, they don’t...
By Karen Morrill-McClure Where to start in a review of a book that’s over 900 pages long? Hard to say. Maybe I should start with what I was looking for. I’m not a complete beginner with PHP, I’ve been using it on my sites for several years now and I’m starting to write more complicated web applications using both PHP...
By Karen Morrill-McClure Recently I got sucked into this situation: a client asked for a quick estimate on a catalog site. I gave a quick, off the cuff estimate, assuming just a home page, listing the products for sale, and an individual page for each product, driven by a database of all the products. I’ve made a couple of sites...
Building Findable Websites Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter I just read the excellent book, Building Findable Websites, and it truly is the book I’ve been searching for over the last couple of years. I’ve been interested in search engines and how they work for a long time and I’ve been dismayed with the emphasis on Search Engine Optimization...
Findability and Search Engine Optimization have been on my mind lately (and on everyone else’s I suppose). Some SEO experts seem to look at the whole thing as a game that you win by getting your page ranked number one on a search result with particular keywords. I do appreciate that search engine ranking is a concrete result (for that...
Well, really I mean when users’ needs conflict. How do you design a site that meets the needs of two different groups of users? Mostly I run into this with the sites I create for non-profit organizations. Who are the two groups of users? One group is the people that the organization helps. These are the ones I think of...
I recently switched web hosts for a client. I hate switching hosts, but it seems like a lot of hosts that start out great (good price, good customer service) hit a certain size and then go down hill rapidly. I’ve had that experience with Frogee and now with Midphase. So, I looked at the site, checked what email addresses we...
If you’ve looked around in Google’s Webmaster Tools (See Part 4 of my series of posts on the tools), you’ll see where you can upload your sitemap file for your web site. Now, if you’re an inquisitive person like me, you might be asking yourself some questions, namely: What are Sitemaps? What does the sitemap do for you? Do you need...
Checking on the incoming links to my blog one day, I found a link to a photo from one of my posts. I was surprised to see that another blog was using my photo in one of their posts. They didn’t give any credit to me for the photo, though they did link back to it. I spent some...
Earlier this week, I began my final installment of this series about Google’s Webmaster Tools with a discussion of the robot.txt file, geographic targeting and the enhanced image search capability. Today, we’ll delve even deeper into the Tools Section. I’ll talk about site verification, crawl rates and preferred domains, and I’ll also tell you how to remove URLs from...
